


somewhere in new orleans

by firstaudrina



Category: American Gods (TV)
Genre: Alternate Episode Interpretation, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Animal Death, Animal Sacrifice, F/M, Ritual Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2020-01-31 11:27:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18590314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: “A zombie and a leprechaun walk into a bar. What’s the punchline?”an alternate version of 2x05, "the ways of the dead."





	somewhere in new orleans

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this ficathon.](https://girljustdied.dreamwidth.org/263262.html?thread=7122270#cmt7122270)

When Sweeney rolled into town, awkwardly closed-mouth head-bopping along to earnest Christian rock, he realized there was only one thing to do: drink. His fingertips were still singed and he smelled like roadkill; he had not told Dead Wife where to meet him, specifically, and he had no money for a motel. His coins never worked in New Orleans. Just one of those things.

He emptied his wallet on a bottle of good whiskey and poured it down his throat until his insides were raw. Weaving and wavering, he got onto a tour bus by accident and made friends with a couple from Montana. He stumbled off at landmarks and posed for pictures in front of mausoleums not half as old as him. Death wherever he went. 

He was kicked off after loudly criticizing the tour guide one too many times. He used the Montanans’ AmEx to set up a tab at the first bar he found. Bastard.

 

 

 

Laura doesn’t wonder about luck. She gets to New Orleans how she gets there. No big fucking deal. 

 

 

 

“Fucks — for fuck’s sake —” Sweeney was all legs and arms but somehow incapable of arranging those limbs in such a way that left him standing. He had one hand on St. Jude and a fistful of plastic beads in the other, the soles of his boots slipping against beer-wet pavement. Laura had woken him up by waterboarding him with half a bottle. She downed the rest, watching him suspiciously. 

“Get it together, Lucky Charms. You owe me a devil.”

“Thought Wednesday’d…” Sweeney collapsed again in piping laughter, pitchy and breathless. “Broke a promise, eh? Didn’t come through like he — like he said he —”

Laura stamped on his foot and Sweeney howled. 

“You’re the fucking devil!” he accused.

“No ‘I told you so’s here,” she informed him. “Put up or shut up, ginger minge.”

 

 

 

What does it mean to recharge a body that was already running on fumes? Laura woke up in the ground gagging on formaldehyde; Argus Panoptes just made her flesh pretty again. No autopsy stitches mar her skin anymore. The rheumy film over her eyes has cleared. Her hair has stopped dropping out in clumps and in the right light, she can pretend there is a touch of pink to her cheeks. 

But she’s melting on the inside, her organs going soft and liquid, maggots squirming in her innards. Everything is still gray, and it has no taste, no feel, no smell. 

Killing a god was one hell of a fucking facelift. 

 

 

 

Sweeney brought gumbo to his mouth in one messy spoonful after another, broth in his beard and rice littering the tabletop. Laura watched him out of the corner of her eye, lips twisted in revulsion. He was sobering up. He wanted a fucking beignet. “Treating a man to lunch’s the least you could do, Dead Wife.” 

“You wanna eat it off the dirt?” she said, a mild threat. “I’d appreciate you being sober enough to make this deal. At least now you can string a sentence together.”

“Didn’t go the way you thought it would with the Norse god of bullshit, huh?”

Laura lit a cigarette and he actually worried, for a second, that it would spark on her fingers and light her up, too. “Does it ever?” A drag, smoke exhaled. “You done yet?”

He eyed the loaded tray of a passing waitress rapturously. “Fried chicken —”

Laura grabbed him by the jacket and practically hauled him over the table with her undead strength. “Let’s get a fucking move on.”

 

 

 

Laura follows Mad Sweeney through the streets of New Orleans, air so dense with star jasmine she can almost sort of smell it. Sweeney is talking, so whatever.

“You think you know what you’re in for, Dead Wife, but you really fucking don’t. Baron owes me one but that don’t mean it’s gonna come easy. This kind of thing has a cost.”

“Gonna cost me more than my life?” Laura wonders, her fingertips playing at the hard bone of her sternum. “More than a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow?”

“Oh, fuck off,” he grumbles. “More than all of it combined, ya twat.”

 

 

 

Baron Samedi laughed for five solid minutes until it petered off into a groan. He shook his head and flicked ash off the end of his cigar. “You didn’t tell me she was god-killed, mad man.” 

“Figured it’d be just a little hiccup for you, eh?” Sweeney was smiling slightly, the closest he got to attempting charm. “Small potatoes for death loa.” 

Samedi snorted, unfulfilled flattery sliding right off him, and turned his attention to Laura. He tipped his top hat back off his face. “Already dead. Complicates things. Easier to come back off the edge. You? Tumbled right into the abyss.” 

“Yeah, I was there,” she said. “Deal or no deal?”

Maman Brigitte came to sit at his side, her red curls against his velvet-clad shoulder. “The heat’s not doing her any favors, is it,” she mused, looked at Sweeney with eyes sparkling. 

“That’s why we’re on kind of a time crunch,” Laura interjected, leaning forward into Brigitte’s sightline. “If you’re just pulling my dick, I could be chasing leads elsewhere.” Sweeney wondered if it was a negotiation tactic or she was just an asshole; had his answer right there. She dropped back in her chair, a rough and jostling slump, and observed them with near-teenage brattiness. “Ostara couldn’t do it, so why the hell could you?”

The Baron and Brigitte chuckled, entertained the way creatures like them could be entertained by trivial mortal bullshit. “You’re right, baby.” Brigitte set her glass of rum down and pushed it across the table to Laura. “What’s a compact without a little tease? You wanna know what you’re signing up for.”

Laura’s eyes were locked on Brigitte’s as she brought the glass to her lips and drank, but her hard expression soon rippled into sudden sickness. She stood halfway and caught herself on the table with both hands, her small body roiling all the way up her spine until a stream of bloody maggots shot out of her mouth and coated her still-full dinner plate.

“Ah, fuck!” Sweeney exclaimed, pushing back so fast his chair scraped along the ground. “Fuck me, I could’ve eaten that.”

Laura wiped her mouth with a shaky hand. “Jesus fuck,” she said, her gaze bright as it refocused on Brigitte. “That felt good.” 

There was a maggot in her hair, clinging tenaciously to a long brown strand. Sweeney picked it out. Laura swatted his hand. 

“Don’t be a goddamn gentleman.”

Samedi and Brigitte observed them passively, like cats. “I won’t dig your grave yet,” he said, then addressed his wife. “Think we could rig something up?”

Brigitte merely waved a hand. “Life and death magic’s all the same.”

 

 

 

They go to the cemetery and find a wide, flat gravestone, long and low to the ground, sheltered by the surrounding mausoleums. This far in, the light from streetlamps is few and far between, just deeper and deeper shadows. Not even the moon in the sky.

Samedi and Brigitte travel with an entourage who start setting candles on every gritty marble surface, nestling the flickering flames amidst the dried-out ivy and fragile leaves. Somehow the candles don’t go out. They place a knife at the foot of the stone before dusting the whole thing with flour; together, Samedi and Brigitte trace their fingers in its surface, sketching out symbols Laura doesn’t know the right names for. Little coffins crisscrossed with lines. Crosses and stars, small flowers and spare hearts. Complicated dashes that look like dismembered spines. They sprinkle rum on the stone and set it on fire. The drumming starts.

“Sometimes a lonely woman comes to me begging for a baby,” Brigitte says, at Laura’s shoulder now, her voice low. “And I do what I can for her.”

“Uh, no thanks,” Laura says. 

She laughs, repeats, “It’s all the same. Same ingredients. Same rules. Putting life where there was none before.”

“As long as we’re clear on the no fucking baby thing.” 

The drumming is starting to get into Laura’s bones. She can feel it the way she must have felt her heart before. She tries to remember running for the bus, having an orgasm. Was this how it felt when your heart raced, this pounding that makes her teeth clatter, her head hurt? 

“Are you hot?” Laura wonders, plucking at the neckline of her dress. “Am _I_ hot?”

This time their laughter seems to echo. Both the Baron and Brigitte are dancing, their people too, this tight circle of writhing bodies that makes Laura’s breathing quicken. Air in her collapsing lungs. There’s sweat on her collarbones, at her temples; a clear bead of perspiration rolls from cheek to chin. What the fuck?

Sweeney is standing off to the side, watching her and chain-smoking. Looking pissy. 

“We honor the dead with flesh and sweat.” Brigitte swishes her skirt away from a bare hip as she rolls to the music. “A little blood too.”

“Meaning?”

Samedi answers, “Meaning sex is a part of death and life, birth and rebirth.” 

Sweeney flicks his cigarette away angrily. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

Brigitte presses back against Samedi, his hands landing on her hips before sliding up over her tits. “He took it away, didn’t he? Your life. He can give it back.”

“He?” Laura is incredulous. “ _He_? Him? Mr. Magically Delicious? He can’t even get across state lines without sinking a boat.”

“There’s symmetry in it.” The Baron trails his lips over the curve of Brigitte’s neck. “A closed circle.”

“You fucking gods —” Laura starts.

“Not gods —”

She turns on Sweeney. “If this is part of some fucking plan of yours —”

“Oh, yeah, I’m just sitting around coming up with wild scenarios to get you into bed —”

“Into stone,” Laura says, and snorts. “You already found a way to get me into the grave once, so.” 

It’s a hit that lands. Once she’d been a girl so bored by being alive that she’d fucked her husband’s best friend to death. How exactly had life led her from one stupid decision to another until she found herself here, contemplating letting a leprechaun fuck her back to life?

“You know what?” Laura twists her dress up over her head. “You think I give a fuck?”

 

 

 

“Now wait a goddamn minute —”

But hadn’t he been the one making warnings about the price tag on resurrection? Shoulda fucking known. Baron had a boner for digging up things best left buried, and Brigitte, well. Sweeney knew her back when she was still Brighid. She liked to get a rise out of people any way she could.

Laura pressed him back onto the stone slab, her small, strong hands on his stomach. Flour rose in a cloud around him, dusted his jeans. She took a few steps away, pale and slight in her cotton tank top and panties. “A zombie and a leprechaun walk into a bar. What’s the punchline?”

“Fucking this,” Sweeney said, and the twist of humor in her mouth let him know they were on the same page. Her eyes so bright since Brigitte’s rum. 

 

 

 

They pass a rooster and a hen over Laura’s body, feathers just brushing her skin. Each flutter is like the scrape of a nail, a sudden shock of sensation where before she had been numb. Now she’s conscious of all of it. Her hair on her shoulders. Her lips pressing together, sheened with saliva. Her reactions are involuntary and uncontrollable, but that’s the fucking thing. She’s reacting. 

“Bury the hen,” Samedi commands. “Get the rum.”

They put the hen in the earth alive and Laura climbs into Sweeney’s lap. She pushes him against the stone and watches him adjust, rolling his shoulders underneath himself, straining his neck in a stretch. Pliable with guilt, or maybe something else. His taut uncertainty in the dark. She’s never really tried to decipher him. He wasn’t a book she cared to read. 

“Dead Wife —"

“Don’t.” She peels the tank top off and her nipples are hard, actually, she can feel the heat of his body between her thighs. Can feel the bite of denim against her cunt. The drumming intensifies, everything hot and close enough to suffocate. Imagine, needing air. The candles cast shivering light over her body. The drums pulse so she doesn’t have to. She’s all liquid inside.

“Laura —”

“ _Don’t_.” She rocks against him, investigating. “Do we have a deal or not?”

Rum splashes onto the ground around them, splattering on Sweeney’s boots. Then there’s a sudden spray of droplets against Laura’s bare back, triggering a sense memory of too many sad summers spent playing happy in the pool. That relief of something cool when the day was just too hot. Her lips find the shape of a smile. Sweeney says, “Deal.”

Brigitte pours more rum into his mouth so Laura bends to suck it off his lips, rub her now-sensitive cheek against the roughness of his beard. She tastes his teeth, clutches his shirt in tight fistfuls when he grabs her hips with two big hands. Her heart doesn’t beat. But she feels it.

She sits back on Sweeney’s thighs and arches an eyebrow, like, _well?_ He doesn’t look away as he works his jeans open and bares the pale skin of his lower belly, vulnerable flesh a stranger to the sun. Laura rises up, sinks down, and she —

She feels that.

Laura tries to match the relentless thrum of sound surrounding them, an indistinguishable shuffle of bodies and chanting of words that weaves in and around the ceaseless drums. Her hips move fast and brutal but Sweeney’s got no problem with that, gets one elbow under himself and secures a foothold for leverage. He has her wrapped up in the crook of one arm, so much of him always, those long, long limbs. Laura is actually gasping for air like it matters, grabbing at Sweeney like she could peel his clothes from his body, peel his flesh from his bones. Samedi cuts the rooster’s throat over them and its blood spills hot over Laura’s skin. 

She moans and shoves Sweeney down, faster now, can’t stop. She tangles her fingers in the stupid plastic necklaces he’s still wearing and bucks her hips like a woman on the verge, can’t go fast enough even with Sweeney urging her on, fingertips digging hard into her temporary flesh as he jerks her against him. 

The world is red behind Laura’s eyelids like the heat is infecting her, zipping up and down her veins, dizzy rum and the drums, always the drums. But then it stops, all at once, the voices cut off and the silence rings, the candles going out in a single gust, just Sweeney breathing now, deep grunts in his throat and her echoing it, spiraling upwards.

Laura throws her head back and screams.


End file.
